Fest Issue 3 2022 by The Skinny

Michael Spicer

Rosie Holt

Reuben Kaye

Josie Long

Masterclass

Blunderland

Sean Choolburra

Reviews Features Listings 24 - 29 Aug Edinburgh Festival Guide festmag.com

ALOK Comedy finds a poetic voice

Inside: Julia Hales

Director

George Sully

Editor

Arusa Qureshi

Sales Team

Tom McCarthy

David Hammond

Christian Gow

Writing Team 2022

Deputy Editor

Ben Venables

Design Team

Phoebe Willison

Dalila D’Amico

Jenni Ajderian, Eilidh Akilade, Alvie, Craig Angus, Anahit Behrooz, Evan Beswick, Sebastian Calver, Deborah Chu, Fringe Dog, Jamie Dunn, Veronica Finlay, Polly Glynn, Katie Goh, Harry Harris, Si Hawkins, Katie

Hawthorne, Becca Inglis, David Koleola, Laura Kressly, Funmi Lijadu, Eve Livingston, Catherine Love, Tamara Mathias, Astrid McCarthy, Phoebe McCarthy, Fergus

Morgan, Oran, Francesca Peschier, Jay Richardson, Anya Ryan, Claire Sawers, Kirstyn Smith

Cover Image

Bronson Farr

Radge Media

Editor-in-Chief

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Digital Editor

Peter Simpson

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Published by Radge Media Limited., M9 Codebase, Argyle House, 3 Lady Lawson Street, Edinburgh, Scotland EH3 9DR. Every effort has been made to check the accuracy of the information in this magazine, but we cannot accept liability for information which is inaccurate. Show times and prices are subject to changes – always check with the venue. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher. Printed by Think Solutions, Glasgow

10, 17, 24 August

Fest Street Dates 2022

8 Beyond the Binary ALOK triumphs at the Fringe

12 A Night at the Soap Opera Julia Hales takes on the International Festival

16 Viral Arrivals Rosie Holt and Michael Spicer

Comedy 19 Josie Long

A welcome return to Josie’s world

Theatre

31 Feeling Afraid as If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen

Genuine and captivating new dark comedy

Music 49 Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The World History’s most remarkable heroines

Kids 52 Sean Choolburra

Fun from the Aboriginal comedy star

54 Map & Listings

Find a show with our hour-by-hour listings and street map

5 Contents Fest 2022 Issue 3

Image credits (top to bottom, le to right): Bronson Farr, Toni Wilkinson, Karla Gowlett, Matt Crockett, Mihaela Bodlovic, Pamela Raith, courtesy of Assembly

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Reuben Kaye's Perfect Day

The Australian cabaret and comedy superstar gives us his thoughts on his perfect day in Edinburgh

What is your favourite place to eat in Edinburgh?

Food? Who has time for food in Edinburgh? For the month of August I subsist on creme brûlées from the creme brûlée van and any stray acrobat that wanders past.

What is the best show that clashes with your own?

There are other shows on?

Where do you like to relax in Edinburgh?

There’s a lovely stables out past Leith I like. They have a stall named after me, my own personal salt lick and the vet is very gentle.

Where’s the best place for a night out?

The Kaye Hole! It’s fast, sweaty, queer, loose and fucking hilarious. The best place to tear down the world and rebuild it. All in one big bump. Me and my band The Close Contacts have all the best, queerest and nastiest acts of the Fringe and an open bar throughout.

What shows are you most looking forward to seeing?

I adore Tina Del Twist, Michelle

SHOW

VENUE: TIME: Assembly Checkpoint 9:30pm – 11:00pm, various dates between 4 - 28 Aug

Brasier, Rhys Nicholson of course. Lizard Boy looks outrageous, James Rowland’s Learning to Fly and also just James as I love him. This Is Not A Show About Hong Kong also, Laura Davis, Cassie Workman’s show Aberdeen is a MUST. Siblings of course and Zach Zucker! But also to just take a punt and see something I’ve never heard of!

Where is the best place for a date/ hook-up?

There’s a small alleyway just off West Newington Place that’s pretty ergonomic.

What would your dream line-up at the Kaye Hole be?

Thanks to the mount of edibles I’ve packed I rarely dream anymore BUT if I did Jinkx Monsoon would be LEGENDARY. Call me bitch! But as for the dream line-up… Jayne County for sure. Grace Jones, FKA Twigs, Sophie (Rest In Power) and Le Tigre… Does Fest have the connections to make that happen? Otherwise the collection of lunatics we’ve brought over will just have to do…

What is your wildest Fringe memory? Come find me and we can make one.

SHOW The Kaye Hole Hosted by Reuben Kaye

VENUE: Assembly Checkpoint

TIME: 11:40pm - 1:10am 26, 27, 28 Aug

Reuben Kaye: The Butch is Back

6 Perfect Day festmag.com

Photo:Jack Moussa

Beyond the Binary

In their ﬁrst comedy-poetry show at the Fringe, mixed-media artist ALOK delves into themes of trauma, belonging and identity. Here, they speak to Eve Livingston about their journey towards healing

8 Cover Feature festmag.com

Afew years ago, ALOK experienced their Saturn Return. “I don’t know if you’re interested in astrology,” they laugh over Zoom on a late July morning, between shows at London’s Soho Theatre. “But it’s when our Saturn is in the same place as it was when we were born, and mine made me really start to think: I need to reckon with a lot of who I was told I should be, and figure out who I really am.”

Some of the outcomes of ALOK’s Saturn Return were intensive therapy, yoga, meditation, and reading and learning about trauma and healing. Another is their self-titled comedy and poetry show, ALOK, which arrived at the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Fringe, in which many of the former are present and felt.

“A big component of the show is me doing this healing journey, trying to understand the pain in my body,” says ALOK. “I’m trying to

say, look at these things we’ve been taught we have to do in private and let’s make them public, because we’re all going through this stuff.”

A world-renowned mixed-media performance artist and author, ALOK, who describes themself as queer and gender non-conforming, grew up in a traditional Indian household in Texas. Their work explores gender, trauma, identity and belonging, complex themes which at first felt “reckless and risky” to explore on stage.

“I was taught that everything you’re struggling with stays inside the family,” they say. “But I began to realise that performance gave me permission to be free. There’s something about being on a stage, having an audience, having lighting, where you get to invent a new way of relating to each other.”

Fringe-goers will find ALOK’s show listed among the LGBTQ+ offerings in this year’s programme, and the performance, they say, seeks to respond to an onslaught of transphobia and discrimination taking place globally – something particularly important in the context of comedy.

“It seems like punching down on trans people has become the surefire way to rally fans for most mainstream comedic acts right now,” ALOK says. The show aims to flip the gaze: “I’m saying, is it trans people that are funny, or is it that all of the routine and absurd practices that straight, heteronormative, cisgender society uses to divide billions of complex souls into one of two genders and maintain the fiction of gender norms – is that the funny part?”

To categorise this as a show exclusively for LGBTQ+ audiences, though, would be a mistake. Rather, ALOK says, this is about exploring the human condition and the trauma in all of us that can sometimes present itself as transphobia and hatred.

“When we have unprocessed grief and unprocessed trauma, that manifests as resentment and bitterness against people

Photo: Kohl Murdock

9 Features

who show us that freedom and healing and joy are possible,” ALOK explains. “It’s easier to destroy other people than it is to reckon with our own grief and our heartbreak.”

If these themes sound a little heavy or serious for a Fringe comedy show, that’s exactly the point. Unprocessed trauma makes us act in ways which are irrational and absurd, like vilifying trans and non-conforming people just for existing. And comedy, says ALOK, is “the only vernacular of the absurd.”

“I’m combining comedy and poetry because it feels like the most honest way to depict how we survive bleak and impossible times,” they continue. “When I’m going through pain and grief in my life, I need humour and levity in order to find the silver lining; sorrow enhances joy and joy enhances sorrow.”

To bring this show to the Traverse and the Fringe is to confront another false binary, says ALOK: that of high versus low culture. People like them, they point out, are often pigeonholed as drag performers who should be performing in clubs rather than high art institutions. But these are sophisticated and traditional art forms that belong in theatres and art festivals, the performance of camp in particular.

“The nature of my jokes is that they’re extremely cerebral – but they’re also extremely camp,” laughs ALOK. “I’m taking high-order postgraduate thinking and expressing it through camp, and I’m trying to show people that that’s the joy of being an artist: we can obliterate these kinds of arbitrary binaries.”

And it matters on another level that this show is being performed at this festival. “I wanted to really hold these arts institutions to account for their complicity with the escalating rise of transphobia,” they say. “And in order to do that, I have to bring it to people who might be uncomfortable with it – that’s

precisely the issue in this moment, other people mistake their discomfort as oppression.”

Even in spite of this context, though, ALOK says they remain full of hope about the future. “There’s so much kindness in the world; there are so many people who are choosing compassion, and that’s where our energy should be in this moment,” they say. The show is a rollercoaster between comedy and poetry, light and dark, sobbing and laughing; but most of all it is a plea for love.

“I love these people who are discriminating against me more than they are capable of hating me, and I genuinely believe that is the only way forward,” ALOK says. “I don’t want to meet people at a lower frequency – I love you so I insist that you do better by me.”

ALOK ’s run at the Traverse has ended. Find out where to see them next at alokvmenon.com

Alok Vaid-Menon’s Beyond the Gender Binary, published by Penguin, out now, £6.99

Photo: Ally Schmaling

10 Cover Feature festmag.com

“I need humour and levity in order to ﬁnd the silver lining”

A Night at the Soap Opera

Opera has been part of the International Festival programme for 75 years, but now a soap opera takes centre stage

Interview: Ben Venables

Julia Hales is an actor, artist and documentary maker. She’s also seen every single episode of Home and Away.

“I have watched every episode,” she conﬁrms over Zoom from Perth. “When I’m on stage and acting, if I have to skip a few episodes, I catch up on computers in the library.”

Home and Away is now Australia’s longest running TV soap. First broadcast in 1988, the drama has never featured a character with Down’s syndrome – Hales’ starting point for You Know We Belong Together, which now arrives at the Edinburgh International Festival from the Black Swan Theatre in Perth, Western Australia.

Hales’ passion for Home and Away (“I love the action, the drama, everything about the show”) stands alongside her other passion –communicating the lives of people with Down’s syndrome. Through dance, music and video Hales and the cast convey their lives with the condition.

“This show is about acceptance, belonging, relationships and karaoke,” she says. This isn’t what we’re used to hearing about Down’s syndrome, but that is precisely Hales’ point.

We can’t understand people with Down’s syndrome if it isn’t represented in the most popular and long-running TV shows: “I really want people with disabilities on screen and TV”.

Those born with Down’s syndrome have an additional chromosome which changes the way the body and brain develop. Down’s syndrome can cause an array of symptoms from cognitive delays to low muscle tone and heart complications. Each individual is di erent though and in the last 30 years the life expectancy for someone with the condition has been raised from 25 to 60 years. One reason for this remarkable change is that people with Down’s syndrome are no longer institutionalised.

Hales herself was born to a doctor and nurse, has two older sisters and a younger brother. Her parents chose not to send her away to an institution – the common practice for children with Down’s syndrome at the time. Instead, Hales followed her big sisters into their local school. “I watched my sister

12 Feature festmag.com

Amy – because she used to be an actress – I watched her acting on stage in high school and that’s when I decided to act,” she says.

Her dream role, of course, would be in Summer Bay. “Home and Away has been my dream since I was eight.” But why Home and Away? Soaps o en become infamous, looked down upon, for their melodrama – surely an odd place to explore the complexities of Down’s syndrome?

“It’s also about community”, says Hales –a theme her show and soaps share. Soaps revolve around ordinary places and people –an East End square, a cul-de-sac or a seaside town.

Home and Away’s stories began around a foster family, allowing for many character comings-and-goings as a natural part of the

events. If Hales had the chance she’d introduce a character of her own creation to Summer Bay: “Well, I’ve actually written a role that I always wanted to play: her name is Claire Stewart. She was adopted and really angry with her adopted parents for not telling her the truth. She wants to ﬁnd her real family and asks for a ticket to Summer Bay.”

It's easy to imagine such a character arriving and staying in Summer Bay. The longevity of soaps means characters become part of our lives, like family. Which would help normalise certain disabilities. Hales would prefer actors with a disability to portray their own conditions, rather than another actor a ect one. Truthful representation inspires others, who can think, “Okay, well, I can do that too.”

Even those that claim never to watch or

Julia Hales, You Know We Belong Together Photo: Toni Wilkinson

13 Features

enjoy soaps are likely to have at least heard of Ken Barlow, Dot Cotton or Harold Bishop. In Home and Away, it’s Alf Stewart, played by Ray Meagher. “He’s the heart and soul in Home and Away. His character, every time I watch him running the diner and the surf club, I think he’s an amazing actor for so many years.” (Hales has ﬁlmed a short scene with Meagher for You Know We Belong Together).

Soaps could do much to help understanding of disability by creating long-running storylines and characters around people with disabilities. And this is a time when Down’s syndrome in particular needs to be understood. At the same time that living with the condition has seen many improvements, pregnancy screening methods have also developed. It is now less invasive and easier to detect the chance of a foetus having the condition. A positive screening for Down’s tends to result in a termination of the pregnancy.

Two years ago, Hales made this the focus of The Upside – a documentary which includes many voices and perspectives. Hales put women’s choice at the documentary’s heart,

interviewing people raising children with the syndrome and those who decided termination was best for them. It’s an exceptional and nuanced ﬁlm in which Hales explores how better to give people a truly informed choice.

Hales seems especially interested in people’s experiences. You Know We Belong Together grew from a previous project in which she did a series of interviews: “I always wanted to know what love means to other people with Down’s syndrome.”

She certainly knows what love has meant to her. “My mum passed away and she knew I was very talented. So that's why I dedicate this show to my mum, she was my best friend. She always wanted everything for me. And she would tell me, she'd say 'Julia, do not give up on your dream'. And I said, Mum, I will never give up.”

SHOW You Know We Belong Together

VENUE: The Lyceum

TIME: times vary, 24–27 Aug

You Know We Belong Together Photo: Toni Wilkinson

14 Feature festmag.com

Features

Viral Arrivals

Rosie Holt and Michael Spicer have built online followings in the hundreds of thousands. We ﬁnd out why they’re leaving the keyboard to head to Edinburgh and the live stage

Interviews: Evan Beswick

Two days before I speak to Rosie Holt, she launches her Tory party leadership bid on Twitter. “Let me tell you a story,” she begins, telling voters about her grandmother, who “worked hard for our country against a very real threat that was like the pandemic but with guns.”

We need someone who is willing to speak the authentic truth,” she intones seriously, woodenly, over stirring, twee music.

Like many of Holt’s other videos (a classic: the Tory minister who doesn’t know if she went to a party or not) it’s so on point that it’s almost possible to be taken in by it. But, also like much of her output, it’s also right on the moment: “I suddenly had to scrap the beginning of my show because it seemed so outdated!” she laughs. “I was talking about things like party games, and suddenly I thought, this now feels a 100 years old.”

Since she began posting Twitter shorts during lockdown, Holt has gone from a relative unknown to an online powerhouse with a quarter-million following and a podcast in which she plays a vapid right-wing shock jock called Harriet Langley-Swindon (sound vaguely familiar?). “It instantly went a bit haywire,” she says of an ongoing viral response. And in 2022, she’s making the leap from online stardom to the vulnerability of live performance.

The day I speak to Michael Spicer, aka the man in The Room Next Door , he’s launching his defence against COVID. He’s croaky, tired, and more game and articulate than I’d ever be in his condition. In a way, it’s very apt for a man who, in his Room Next Door

videos, suffers the slings and arrows of the idiocy of public figures as he, through an earpiece, tries fruitlessly to serve as what he terms their “moral compass”. “It was the wrong thing to do,” the exasperated coach screams at Prince Andrew in one short. “My judgement was probably coloured by my tendency to be too honourable,” replies HRH instead, contra any best advice.

“It was all about car crash interviews,” Spicer laughs.

It’s been quite a journey for Spicer. Part

Rosie Holt Photo: Karla Gowlett Photo: Matt Crockett

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of that is practical. Though a writer and performer who’d had viral hits before, none struck such a sustained chord as The Room Next Door , which begun with a going-over of the Boris Johnson “bus models” interview in May 2019. By the time of Johnson’s resignation speech, Spicer’s half a million followers genuinely expected his take on it. He has a book deal, a live tour and a life beyond the anteroom with a radio show and a film pitch. But part of that has been creative: “As I’ve done more and more of these, the culture certainly has shifted thanks to Trump, I think to this more sort of grandstanding ideological politics which doesn’t actually have any sure footing. It’s just a way of poking a stick at the voter.”

For both Holt and Spicer, their digital rise has been extraordinary. But I’m surprised on two accounts. The first, that neither spends a lot of time poring over the analytics and playing to the numbers. Indeed, both are refreshingly sanguine about the frenetic movements of the online herd: “There have

been a number of occasions whereby I’ve gained like 1000, 2000 followers and I haven’t done anything,” Spicer says. For Holt, the growth was largely organic: “When the first video did well I cottoned on and thought, OK, this is something that works.” Though she remains optimistic about this: “You’re not always in control of it.”

The second is that both see live performance as, in some way, better than online success. For Holt, it’s simple: “I love doing the online thing,” she says, calling live performance “the real deal”. Though there’s an immediacy to being able to put things out on Twitter, there’s also a distancing: “It's a very different process, because you'll be filming it, doing it on your own, and then you get kind of a delayed reaction. What is so lovely about live performance is you get that sort of instant feedback.”

Spicer’s show, in which he tells his own story, alongside “greatest hits” and “a nice healthy mix of other sketches and other bits, and bobs” is his first live since 2003. There is, he says, “a genuinely a nice element to stepping outside of the online world.” Even more surprisingly, it’s more financially viable than the content factory of the web: “I don’t know how to generate money from clicks,” he says, describing live performance as the “route out”. I’m gonna fess up here: at a time when mere anarchy is loose upon the world and it feels like the internet trolls are vying to be the next PM, this all feels rather heartening.

SHOW Rosie Holt: The Woman’s Hour

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 6:00pm – 7:00pm, 3–29 Aug, not 16

SHOW Michael Spicer: The Room Next Door

VENUE: Assembly George Square Studios

TIME: 3:40pm – 4:40pm, 19–28 Aug

"It instantly went a bit haywire"

Rosie Holt

Michael Spicer Photo: Michael Spicer

17 Features

Comedy Reviews

Josie Long: Re-Enchantment

VENUE: Monkey Barrel Comedy

TIME: 2:50pm – 3:50pm, 4–28 Aug not 10, 17, 24

Earnestness is not a trait seen in many comedians these days, perhaps an understandable reaction to the world being the way it is. But Josie Long isn’t just any comedian, and she’s so excited to be back on stage. It’s palpable: earnest in a way that isn’t annoying. Her refrain as she breathlessly wanders

the stage is, “and yet, and yet, and yet.” It’s a really lovely way to be welcomed back into her world.

Unadulterated enthusiasm, in Josie’s case at least, doesn’t translate into being twee or simplistic, far from it. Because while there are gags about being a new mum, moving to Scotland and being diagnosed with ADHD, Josie has lost none of her gently roaring ﬁre. In fact, it’s these kinds of relatable topics that are laced with the most bite: Scotland

gets the baby box – here’s why the country is so much better than England. Everything rolls back around to a mildly manic disappointment with the state of the UK today.

Long has a stunning way with words. It doesn’t matter if she’s comparing socialism to nu-metal or describing her daughter’s day at outdoor nursery, it’s done with a deliberate, pitch-perfect turn of phrase – and the jokes-perminute counter is huge. And her call-to-action ﬁnale is a much-needed beacon of hope above right-wingery, climate disaster and despair.

Kirstyn Smith Photo: Matt Crockett

Garry Starr: Greece Lightning

VENUE: Underbelly, Cowgate

TIME: 8:55pm – 9:55pm, 4–28

Aug, not 17

Somewhere between the Battle of Troy being retold through the medium of German Expressionism, and the spectacle of a semi-nude Narcissus crawling across the audience to gawp at his reﬂection, it occurs to you that Greece Lightning is not your average classics lesson. Taking us on this deliriously funny tour of Greek mythology is Garry Starr, the alter-ego of Australian comedian Damien Warren-Smith.

The premise of Greece Lightning, explains Starr at the outset, is to save “Greek” from decades of “ergonomic procession” by encouraging us all to go there on our holidays and spend loads of “gyros”. Really though, it’s an inspired showcase for Starr’s adroit clowning and gonzo comic sensibility.

Bounding on stage as Mount Olympus head honcho Zeus, complete with lightning bolts dangling from his nipples and an incongruous Elizabethan ru around his neck, Starr works his way through all of your favourite Greek deities, Titans and side players. This one-man whirlwind is supported by a game audience, whose Herculean tasks include battling a Cyclops and taking on an adorable Cerberus whose three heads bear a striking

resemblance to Sooty’s canine BFF – although their biggest challenge of the night is knowing where to look when Atlas’s tiny loin cloth goes awry.

If you don’t know your Athena from your Uranus, don’t worry. Working knowledge of Greek Myth isn’t required to

appreciate the sublime cra of Starr’s physical performance and his complete command of the audience. The results are a quintessential Fringe experience where it feels like anything and everything could happen.

Jamie Dunn

Photo: Aaron Walker

20 Comedy festmag.com

Frankie Thompson: Catts

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 9:25pm – 10:25pm, 3–28 Aug, not 15

One of the great joys of the Edinburgh Fringe is just glancing at your fellow ticket-holders when something fantastically odd is going on, onstage. No doubt Catts will attract a number of curious Lloyd-Webber fans and unassuming

cat-lovers across the course of its run, who will get to the bit with Frankie Thompson, the wedding dress and the litter tray and realise that, good heavens, they are deﬁnitely not in Kansas anymore.

The o cial blurb for Catts calls it a ‘lip-synced ballet’, which sums things up pretty well: imagine if an old 80s Kate Bush video went awry and the prancing Bush started miming to reality shows, workout tapes and freaky old interviews instead, all jerkily cut together, VHS-style, on the big screen.

What gradually emerges is that this is a peek into the mind of someone actively

becoming the stereotypical crazy cat lady, a life among felines suddenly seeming much simpler than trying to make sense of the noisy, stressful and stupid world we negotiate every day.

But take it as you will: there are silly puns and performance-arty bits, Cassetteboy-style video mash-ups and emotional human moments, all of it underpinned by a hugely impressive performance from Thompson. Having to learn a whole speech – snide pauses and all – by a particularly objectionable future member of Her Majesty’s Government: that’s dedication. Si Hawkins

Photo: Thomas Moen

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Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 9:35pm – 10:35pm, 3–28

Aug, not 17

Leo Reich is 23, the youngest comedian that has ever lived, and a narcissist. This Edinburgh debut is his announcement to the world. Camp, shallow and delightfully good-fun, it proves he is a star in the making.

Of course, Reich knows all

this because his ego is sky high. Deadpan, he talks about the everyday di culties of being young, queer and Jewish. The youth need to take up space and “proﬁt o it,” he declares, so he’s written his memoir, which he reads from over a jazzy score, early.

It is an ironic parody of the Gen-Z experience and Reich is a vacuous monster born from their social media-controlled lives. He is convinced he’s something special, has things to say and is a genius. He has serious beliefs – he wrote them in his phone’s notes app. It is just now he’s lost it, he has forgotten what they

are. It doesn’t matter though, because we are lucky to be there, he tells us. But jokes aside, he’s right. Reich has charisma in ﬁstfuls. Flouncing round the stage, he breaks up his self-obsessed jabbers with showy songs that are an ode to the struggles of the over 50s or narrate his experience having sex with men that hate him.

The whole time, he remains wholly uninterested in the audience – we’re there to see him, a er all. But, boy, has he got us watching. And with his Dad’s “small business” ﬁnancial backing, he is set to ﬂy.

Anya Ryan

23 Review

Photo: Raphael Neal

Britney: Friends and Nothing More

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 5:45pm – 6:45pm, 4–28

Aug, not 16

Friends since Year Nine, Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson’s show rings with the authenticity and private language that blossoms with those we like and know best.

As Britney, the sketch duo take us from creative-source to sea. Clive and Robertson’s shared history allows them a special trust in their writing. We watch them deliver skits that must have made each other laugh long before they’ve translated it into material that works for an audience. A quote from Stephen King on writing and marriage, surely once the fragment of an initial idea, introduces their take on the domestic relationship the horror author has with his wife, Tabitha. They have a closeness which allows them a quiet conﬁdence, we’re able to luxuriate in the sketches between sketches as they take apart their Heely x Reeboks, bemoaning the cumbersome mechanics of carrying around the footwear’s universal wrench.

They gleefully play around with routines, turning jokes upside down, giving us the pay-o to their Beauty and the Beast parody long before we hear the set-up. As clever

as they are goofy, mining groans and laughs, extending the mileage of every line, Friends and Nothing More is a

generous hour of comedy in which we get to share the language of friendship and be in on every joke. Ben Venables

25 Review

Photo: Linda Blacker

Lara Ricote: GRL/LATNX/ DEF

VENUE: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)

TIME: 3:20pm – 4:20pm, 2–28 Aug, not 17

Lara Ricote is a lot of things. We know, thanks to her show title, that she is a girl, she is Latinx and she is deaf. She’s also whip-smart, deadpan AF and seemingly blessed with funny bones.

GRL/LATNX/DEF is Ricote’s debut hour, working as an

introductory show to her and her life. Luckily, she has plenty going on to mine funny from: two sisters (one also deaf, one just stupid), a Latin mum with hardcore beliefs about virginity and – because of said Latin mum – a newly awakened sex life (“I didn’t know I had a clitoris until four years ago.”) She also has a lot of worries about the climate crisis, but this is not a show about the climate crisis. Not really. Sure, there are analogies about the degenerative hearing loss she lives with and how one day she’ll be completely deaf, but there’s no way you could draw a line between the two things. Right.

Ricote is a generous performer, allowing punchlines to land and lie for as long as the audience needs, her self-aware self-deprecation remains on the right side of needy, and she bats away a heckler with disarming charm and improv. Being a minority is in right now, she says, but there’s more to explore here, and she takes time to consider the ways she does and doesn’t “pass” in a world where she sometimes can’t quite ﬁnd her community. But then she busts out a whole bit that puts her at the same level as Rachel Bloom in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and you know she’ll be just ﬁne.

Kirstyn Smith Photo: Steve Ullathorne

26 Comedy festmag.com

Sam Nicoresti: Cancel Anti

Wokeﬂake Snow Culture

VENUE: PBH’s Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth

TIME: 8:55pm – 9:45pm, 6–28

Aug, not 17

Going in feet-ﬁrst on the rightwing comics and free speech ideologues sounding o about cancel culture, Sam Nicoresti’s latest show is both admirably forthright in confronting the fascistic tendencies of that movement, especially towards

the transgender, and artfully mischievous in pursuing its aims of ridiculing the more cynical blowhards among them. Moreover, he’s got real skin in the game, having lately begun a journey of queer self-discovery that’s still in a curious, questing form, a ording his 50 minutes a freshness and raw vitality in tandem with its topicality, despite the reasonably slick multimedia he deploys and artistic sensibilities he aspires to.

Employing a twisted alter-ego, Nam Sicoresti, and big screen for faux-conversations with fellow gender spectrum sceptics, he’s accomplished at exposing the fallacies of logic espoused by his enemies. Putting words in their mouths

sure, but only to an extent. Better still are the more personal monologues he delivers directly to the audience, with a well-argued dismissal of the furore around toilets, just generally humanising the bitterly fought debate while getting in some recurring, enjoyable gags at the monarchy’s expense.

Unfortunately, Nicoresti’s thoughtfulness and investment in his subject matter also work against him, as he closes on an interminably lengthy and sincere set of conclusions that relegate the comedy to second place, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and a ording succour and ammunition to his foes.

Jay Richardson

27 Review

Photo: Ed Moore

Sikisa: Life of the Party

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 8:25pm – 9:25pm, 3–28

Aug, not 17

Sikisa’s party spirit is challenged by stereotypes in her Fringe debut about living your best life, but you can’t keep a good woman o the dance ﬂoor. Ready to stay out all night, this hostess with the mostest takes on unfounded beliefs about black women in a sassy hour.

An immigration lawyer from South London with roots in Barbados, Sikisa is fed up with people’s assumptions about her. In the show, some of these views are revealed through interactions with people she meets at a house party, allowing her to address di erent perspectives while discussing a range of topics, including cocaine use, gentriﬁcation, fuckbois and interracial dating.

Involving a member of the audience, she talks about the plight of immigrants, using a game to demonstrate what it takes to get a UK passport. It’s a surprisingly rare moment of audience interaction, following the enthusiastic greeting at the start of the show. The banging tunes at the entrance hinted at a party for all, but Sikisa is the only one who gets to take regular ‘dance

breaks’, which may be why the energy levels in the room slightly drop across the hour. Even so, this is a high-spirited

call to celebrate life and love yourself from a comedian who knows how to have fun.

Veronica Finlay

28 Comedy festmag.com

Photo: Adrain Tauss

Theatre Reviews

Feeling Afraid as If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen

VENUE: Roundabout @ Summerhall

TIME: times vary, 5-28 Aug, not 9, 16, 23

In the round, a stand-up comic turns. We see the Comedy Store-style cartoon grin festooning the back of his pink jacket – the rictus logo of professional laugh-making – as his red Converse trainers shu e through stances. He grabs the mic to start his set – and restart, and restart, until he gets the opening right.

Our livewire lead, played by Tony- and Olivier-nominated

Samuel Barnett (The History Boys), lets us into his love life with confessional abandon. Barnett is immaculate; fully embodying the tangled neuroses of being British, male, gay and a comedian as he traverses the London dating scene. He is utterly convincing as a comic, nailing the requisite inﬂections, mannerisms and o -stage awkwardness. He does soaring justice to Marcelo Dos Santos’ equally pristine writing, too: self-conscious, naturalistic, by turns wise and fallible, hitting both hilarious and heart-wrenching with winking de ness.

There are echoes of former Moody smash hits – Fleabag, Angry Alan, Baby Reindeer et al – but such box-lumping undersells Feeling Afraid…’s distinct identity. Comedy – as a form – is integral to not just the structure of the show (the monologue is rendered as stand-up, mostly), but also to its examination of presentation, truthfulness, insecurity

and mental health. It’s performance about performance, but without any insu erable, try-hard self-awareness. Genuine and captivating, Barnett boasts a well-earned full circumference of laser-locked eyelines from start to end, his self-reﬂections and second-guessing visibly resonating with every unblinking face. Like good stand-up, Feeling Afraid… manifests a vivid world, and Matthew Xia’s tight direction brings to life the narrative’s cruel ironies as our star’s relationship unfolds. The title bears obvious portent, but the story is not gloomy. Instead, there is tension, but it’s a tension familiar to any thinking, feeling human navigating love and sex in our frantic, app-yoked lives – and especially to those who use humour to deﬂect when things get too much. The show’s faultless execution is matched only by this audience’s thunderous, cathartic, cry-laughing response. George Sully

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Masterclass

VENUE: Pleasance Dome

TIME: 5:40pm – 6:40pm, 3–28 Aug, not 10, 15, 22

Can we fully separate the art from the artist? How important are intentions when examining the impact of an artist’s work? Can we ever, truly, answer these questions?

Like a reﬂexologist, Adrienne Truscott ﬁnds these knots deep in the muscles of theatre and attempts to work them out. Staged as a highbrow interview in the vein of Inside the Actors Studio, Masterclass pits Feidlim Cannon (Brokentalkers) as the host, all corduroy and tweed, against Adrienne Truscott’s male auteur persona.

Truscott – the man – is a fantastically gross exaggeration, a knowingly arch critique of male ego (both in its bluster and veiled fragility), and an apposite creation to springboard discussions around gender and power in the arts. He is asked about his “alleged” inability to write complex female characters; his responses are a pastiche of those elliptical, kneejerk non-answers we’ve heard in many a hagiographic Q&A.

Cannon shi s between sycophancy and confrontation in his questioning, a changing dynamic sometimes made physical through bu oonery. There’s a cartoonishness to the clowning and sound cues which undermines the seriousness of what’s being discussed, an inspired move that recalls the ﬂimsy, pantomime e orts of cis men discussing issues concerning people who

aren’t in the room.

Of course, with Truscott, things are rarely as they ﬁrst appear. There are passages in the piece’s latter sections which wax much more literal. These could, unfairly, be labelled preachy, but only because there is clear exasperation at how the more nuanced representations of these struggles are misinterpreted or simply ignored. Here, it is done artfully, with justiﬁcation, thanks to Truscott’s wealth of expertise and passion for both the form and the subject.

The text is dense, but necessarily so; these are not simple problems. But this is, ultimately, a Fringe show; there is tension-relieving fun amid the righteous fury. Even at its thorniest, at its knottiest, Masterclass still shows Truscott relishing in the playfulness of deconstruction.

George Sully Photo: Ste Murray

32 Theatre festmag.com

Silkworm

VENUE: Assembly Roxy

TIME: 6:50pm – 8:05pm, 4–29 Aug, not 10, 17, 24

A camcorder sits at the edge of the stage. Its pervasiveness is ever-present as the couple go through the motions of their lives, trying to forget that the captured ﬁlm may determine whether they are permitted immigration status. Abidemi and Omolade have recently come from Lagos to Glasgow, following fears of

being outed to their families and communities. The play explores their relationship when under the scrutiny of the UK’s Home O ce. When threatened with deportation, how must one perform and record love? And for who?

The stage, their kitchen, holds space for this complexity, with its greying half-shut blinds. However – with a few turns of a table, a shi in lighting – this kitchen becomes the Home O ce. It’s subtle but nuanced, communicating how the violence of the UK’s immigration policy inhabits the space of those under its assessment.

Narratively, it’s heavy but it’s not dragging. It’s sometimes

slow, weighted by moments of this gentle love and by moments of a certain fraught sadness. Punctuated by monologues – textured through sound, us hearing what the characters once heard – this is storytelling at its most transcendent.

For two characters who are at times so detached from one another, their connection as actors is utterly palpable. This active bond, moving in and out of each other, allows for each character to have moments holding the stage alone, creating some of the play’s most striking scenes. Forceful and deeply impactful, it is a necessary watch.

Eilidh Akilade

33 Review

Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

34 festmag.com

Wilf

VENUE: Traverse Theatre

TIME: times vary, 5–28 Aug, not 8, 15, 22

The road feels like the cultural preserve of America. Long highways and evocative motels and Thelma and Louise riding o the Grand Canyon. British roads are tight and knotty. They’re Ginsters pasties and Costa co ee. They can make you feel sick.

Wilf, then, is a brilliant interpretation of a road movie for these shores. At a low ebb in

his life, processing the trauma of a physically abusive boyfriend and a psychologically abusive mother, Calvin ﬁnds comfort in a beaten up VW he christens Wilf, and the A82 between Glasgow and Inverness. But not without some bumps along the way.

Of course, the relationship between Calvin and Wilf is really the relationship between Wilf and himself. While the personiﬁcation of the car is quite charming and funny, it’s also a clear cry for help, a kind of mania that Calvin is slowly descending into that you know is going to get worse before it gets better.

Thankfully, there is real joy

and hope in this story – without wanting to give too much away, one sentence in the ﬁnal monologue crystallises this, serving to recontextualise everything we’ve seen up until that point in a beautiful way. Michael Dylan really sells the whole thing. As Calvin he is incredibly endearing, getting the audience on side almost immediately, but also able to strike that balance between light and dark. Both Irene Allan as the foul-mouthed driving instructor-cum-psychotherapist, and Neil John Gibson as… well, you lose count of how many people he plays – put in great comic turns too.

Harry Harris

35 Review

Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic

Brown Boys Swim

VENUE: Pleasance Dome

TIME: 2:30pm – 3:30pm, 3–28 Aug, not 15

The boisterous sounds of Desi bangers, including Panjabi MC’s Mundian to Bach Ke, ﬁll the room as Kash playfully teases the audience with his slick bhangra moves. He’s wearing a kurta, dancing with determination and a cheeky grin until he’s joined by his quieter, calmer counterpart Mohsen.

Brown Boys Swim is a tender coming-of-age story with a seemingly innocent premise: two Asian friends are desper-

ate to learn how to swim in order to make a mark at an upcoming pool party thrown by the cool crowd. But while the story appears light-hearted and even comical in its set-up, there is an underlying darkness in the narrative, largely arising from the othering of Kash and Mohsen by their classmates and wider society.

Actors Varun Raj and Anish Roy are magnetic in their portrayal of two contrasting best friends whose union is more akin to that of brothers. They argue and throw insults at each other but also take on the world and its many micro-aggressions: from the prying eyes at the swimming pool to the suspicious looks of shop security who watch as they buy their ﬁrst swimming trunks.

The staging and minimal set

design, with glowing blue lighting, places you at the edge of a swimming pool and in a stu y locker room. The choreography of the boys learning to swim is thought-out with precision – there’s no water but Kash and Mohsen really appear submerged and ﬂailing as they attempt to ﬂoat.

In the script’s mash-up of English with small phrases of Urdu, including swear words commonly articulated by Asian elders, and hilarious in-jokes about incidents like having your ﬂip-ﬂops stolen at Friday prayers, Karim Khan’s play feels both personal to those in the community and universal in its messaging. Brown Boys Swim unpacks that feeling of being an outsider while doing everything in your power, and sometimes to your detriment, to assimilate. Arusa Qureshi

Photo: Geraint Lewis

36 Theatre festmag.com

Age is a Feeling

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: 12:10pm – 1:20pm, 3–28

Aug, not 8, 15, 22

Haley McGee sits atop a lifeguard’s chair, staring into the future. Your future. But she’s not going to tell you the whole story. Surrounding her are envelopes with cryptic titles – oysters, inbox, ﬁst – that are tied to tall plastic ﬂowers, circling McGee like numbers on a clockface. She picks them like daisies, o ering them up to the audience. What chapter do we want to hear next? The unchosen stories get pushed to the ground with a breezy shrug: “Anyway!” she says, smiling like a friend withholding grade A gossip.

Age is a Feeling speaks directly to you. It takes place on your 25th birthday, and it leads you through decades of life, through break-ups and aching bones and missed opportunities. The “you” in the play is vague enough that you can truly superimpose yourself, but also speciﬁc and alive enough for you to develop real tenderness towards this avatar, this pseudo-you.

Directed by Adam Brace, McGee is a convincing, charismatic sage and makes this enormously text-heavy show feel like a breeze. But her magical omniscience also veers towards sentimentality: it implies that, in the end, everything smooths out in the wash of hindsight, and universal advice (stretch, ﬂoss, veg-

etables, etc) feels more akin to Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) than hard-won knowledge. Still, there’s scarcely a dry eye in

the house once McGee reaches the show’s ﬁnal resting place – and that’s with only half the story.

Katie Hawthorne Photo: Thea Courtney

38 Theatre festmag.com

Hungry

VENUE: Roundabout @ Summerhall

TIME: 5:25pm - 6:35, 3–28 Aug, not 4, 9, 16, 23

Bex, a young Black woman working as a waitress, meets Lori, a white chef at a catering event. This is the start of an intense but profoundly ﬂawed and unbalanced relationship. Lori is ambitious, but holds inherently problematic views that manifest through her thinking about di erent foods and their origins. Bex is content with her life, but

hyper-aware of the systems that oppress her. Though they quickly fall for each other, their di erences lead to intense conﬂict. Playwright Chris Bush’s polar opposite characters, whip-smart dialogue and socio-political commentary, along with Katie Posner’s highpaced direction, means this play is one of the stars of this year’s Fringe.

Bush’s o en-serious writing has many excellent jokes and one-liners that e ectively balance the weightier themes in the play. She uses non-linear time to gradually reveal key points in Bex and Lori’s relationship. We see the later stages amidst the earlier,

with bigger reveals coming towards the end. It’s a smart structure that works well to keep things varied in a show with a small cast and a single set. Posner ensures the transitions are quick and clearly marked so it’s easy to know what is the present and what is the past.

Actors Eleanor Sutton and Leah St Luce are exceptional. Their chemistry ensures their relationship is totally convincing and their energy drives the play through to its inevitable end. All of the production elements come together exquisitely to make for a phenomenal production.

Laura Kressly

39 Review

Photo: Rebecca Need Menear Artwork: Conor Jatter

How to Build a Wax Figure

VENUE: Assembly George Square Studios

TIME: 12:55pm – 1:55pm, 4–29 Aug, not 10, 16, 23

Eyes, as the saying goes, are the windows to the soul. It’s not accidental, then, that the protagonist of Isabella Waldron’s tender new play makes prosthetic eyes. There’s lots here about seeing and being seen, along with plenty of meaning-heavy looks and poignant locking of gazes. It’s a show about making eyes, in both senses of the phrase.

17-year-old Bea (Nell Barlow) is introduced to ocularistry by Margot (Olivia Dowd): the enigmatic wax model maker who moves in next door to her family home. Margot is older, artistic, entrancing. The two women form a friendship and a working partnership – Margot makes the bodies, Bea makes the eyes. Bit by bit, friendship tips over into intimacy, leaving a lasting mark on them both.

This central story of ﬁrst love is gently and beautifully told, with carefully weighted dialogue and delicate performances. In director Nell Bailey’s production, the connection between Bea and Margot is instantly believa-

ble and compelling, without brushing away the discomfort of their age gap and unequal power dynamic.

Less successful, though, is the containing narrative, in which an older Bea prepares to deliver a lecture at the Wellcome Collection and is dragged back into her memories, which she shares with museum employee Dana (Alice Franziska). Too o en, these scenes feel like a contrivance that simply facilitates the depiction of Bea and Margot’s relationship. That said, the show as a whole is quietly heartbreaking, marking out Waldron, Bailey and their impressive cast as talents to watch.

Catherine Love

Image:

Courtesy of Assembly

40 Theatre festmag.com

Dance, Physical Theatre & Circus Reviews

Sense of Centre

VENUE: Dance Base

TIME: 3:40pm – 4:20pm, 6–28 Aug, not 22

Edinburgh choreographer and dancer Jack Webb draws heavenly curves and squiggles through the air in this solo dance piece, full of so ness and introspection. A Scottish accented voiceover braids together abstract notions of identity, home and belonging,

with memories dri ing in from Dundee, Dublin, Edinburgh and the Arctic, amongst other places. The narrative begins with speciﬁc childhood memories and becomes more suggestive and poetic, with the emphasis more on a growing momentum of emotions than a detailed story arc. Tense white noise builds and swells, with Webb’s long limbs scissoring and wrapping around themselves before the piece eventually reaches a blissed out place of calm.

Webb begins by placing miniature props on a turntable – tiny plastic hands and model

railway trees are filmed live and projected onto a screen behind him. A er those close up sequences, everything zooms out and he dances with grace and strength in front of huge projections of deep sea and rolling waves, his body seeming to merge with the water as he undulates and ripples towards the hypnotic final section. As people and places have ebbed and flowed around him, it seems that his body has remained a safe place, something he knows and recognises, and the centre to which he returns.

Claire Sawers

Image: Courtesy of Storytelling PR

42 festmag.com Dance, Physical Theatre & Circus

Cirque Alfonse: Animal

VENUE: Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows

TIME: 4:25pm – 5:25pm, 6–27 Aug, not 10, 15, 22

Ever seen a farmer do a wheelie with a tractor? Cirque Alfonse’s Animal is grimy and domestic, more farmhandsgone-wild than Lion King, but although the props are humble (milk churns, wheelbarrows, that sort of thing), the stunts are anything but. Backed up by a set dressed in corrugated iron and a dynamic three-piece rock band, Cirque Alfonse’s ﬁve performers juggle a repertoire of stunts even better than they do a box of free-range eggs. It’s a wacky show, with a strong aesthetic in lieu of any narrative, but who needs narrative when you can watch a weirdly high stakes game of piggy in the middle with an enormous cowbell as the ball?

The Quebecois family outfit, suitably attired in faded denim dungarees, flared chaps, and tiny tweed waistcoats, laugh at each other as o en as they fling their partners skyhigh. There is visible a ection between the performers, and this looseness makes Animal a playful, punchy watch. Stunning teamwork (particularly in a duet between two contortionists) and absurd humour compensates for the odd lull in proceedings: a seesaw rubber chicken routine goes nowhere fast, and an interpretive knife dance about the

grim reaper is a bit of a downer, though both skits encapsulate Cirque Alfonse’s kooky, bedtime-story-gone-wrong energy. An athletic ﬁnal showdown with a mechanical bull

brings feeding time to a close, triumphantly closing the barn doors on this family-friendly hour at the (deep breath) farmyard-circus-cabaret.

Katie Hawthorne

43 Review

Image: Courtesy of Underbelly

Cabaret Reviews

Blunderland

VENUE: Underbelly’s Circus

Hub on the Meadows

TIME: 9:55pm – 10:55pm, 5–27 Aug, not 15, 22

Cabaret performers have long known that you can rhinestone the hell out of anything and make it art. Yet few have taken it to Blunderland host Eric Schmalenberger’s extremes. When the MC is sheathed in a see-through, giant condom, adorned with tasteful-sparkle jizz, you get

an idea of what is (potentially literally) coming.

This late-night variety show is a sequinned gross-out absurdity that feels more underground New York than actual New York. It’s also as hot as a psychedelic chemsex sauna orgy. As the Michete score hails, the Blunderland gang are acting slutty while looking bitching.

There is little linking (OK, nothing) the acts apart from a sense of club-kid anarchy, unapologetic thirst-traps and a predilection for hot pink glitter. There’s stunning aerial from Em Chilvers and Leo Pentland, alongside creepy juggling from human-haunted

doll Olivia Porter. Mixed with burlesque and Bede Nash’s cocaine-fuelled-gymnast at the world’s-gayest-Butlins routine, it’s a stunning, Queer, messy riot.

And if you’ve ever wondered what Mariah Carey looks like taking a shit, look no further than Australian performance artist Tara Boom. Her conception to abortion clown-grotesque is a political statement on reproductive rights, danced out from atop a toilet in spangled sperm shoes. Blunderland is ﬁlthy but not frothy. These freaks put on one seriously clever, subversive show.

Francesca Peschier Photo: Jacinta Oaten

Grandmother’s Closet

VENUE: Summerhall

TIME: 12:30pm – 1:30pm, 3–28 Aug, not 15, 22

Performed with jazz hands, lipstick, and spit-and-polish determination, Grandmother’s Closet is a gentle autobiography of self-discovery. Writer and performer Luke Hereford welcomes us with open arms, as if we’re guests in his nan’s cozy, chintzy living room, and it really is easy to imagine this family home stu ed with

memories – his storytelling is detailed and familiar, with the sweetly painful nostalgia of old home video tapes.

The neatly maximalist set design is nan’s house perfection; a cluttered dressing table and glamorously overstu ed wardrobe are Hereford’s dance partners, as he brings us childhood ﬂashbacks through a series of musical mashups. Backed up by exuberant Bobby Harding on keys, Hereford has a strong voice and even stronger commitment to his favourite divas: a Judy Garland moment is impeccable, a Kylie/Kate Bush blend is particularly ambitious, and a Scissor Sisters extrava-

ganza brings down the house.

But beyond the sequins and polyester, the heart of the show is Hereford’s double-act with his grandma – by all accounts a woman so glamorous she could shield him from the di culties of growing up queer in a small town, but also who pushed him to discover the wholeness of himself. The storytelling falters when it steps back into the present day, and there is more to explore when Hereford worries about losing their shared stories due to her developing dementia, but this is a tender, cathartic show with a glamorously large heart.

Katie Hawthorne Photo: Kirsten McTernan

46 Cabaret

48 festmag.com

Music Reviews

Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The World

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 1:30pm – 2:50pm, 4–29

Aug, not 10, 17, 24

History isn’t always kind to women, a fact reiterated by the steady erasure of prominent names over time. In all facets of life, women are systematically denied credit for their innovations, discoveries and social triumphs, resulting in a history that is o en incomplete and one-sided. Fantastically Great Women Who Changed The

World, the musical adaptation of Kate Pankhurst’s picture book, attempts to remedy this by giving voice to some of history’s most remarkable heroines.

Schoolgirl Jade (played charmingly by Kudzai Mangombe) loses her group during a visit to a museum, eventually stumbling upon the closed Gallery of Greatness exhibit. As she laments teen life, di culties at home and the notion of feeling invisible, various historical ﬁgures breeze through o ering sage advice on how to be heard and make your mark as a bold and fearless woman. Amelia Earhat, Gertrude Ederle and Sacagawea step up ﬁrst to tell their stories, followed by the likes of Mary Seacole, Marie Curie, Rosa Parks and Anne Frank.

The cast of ﬁve, including

Mangombe, are commanding and versatile in their stage presence, ensuring that the feel-good factor never fully diminishes. One section of note, featuring Emmeline Pankhurst in purple camouﬂage, is particularly powerful in its Formation-era Beyonce step dancing and mash-up of militaristic beats with pop and rap.

Chris Bush’s adaptation fuses up-tempo pop wizardry with the type of musical energy that is akin to previous Fringe hit Six the Musical There are moments that threaten to veer o into the na but then you remember the target audience for this show – and as young, inquisitive faces stare at the bright, neon coloured set wide-eyed and in awe, it’s clear there has been some level of success here.

Arusa Qureshi Photo: Pamela Raith

Sex with Friends (and Other Tiny Catastrophes)

VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 12:40pm - 1:40pm

3–28 Aug, not 10, 17, 24

Six friends explore themselves (and each other) in this new musical by young queer theatre company GOYA. We watch Mel, Lily, Jordan, Willow, Marc and Ben negotiate their post-University friendships, while political a liations, corporate jobs, wanderlust and romantic ties push them together and pull them apart. Sex With Friends is strong-

est when it digs into their contrasting desires and ambitions, o en using duets to battle it out from opposing sides, but the musical’s snapshot structure – spread over a series of parties, many months apart – makes it tricky to ﬂesh out these characters as recognisable people. Savvy costuming takes us some of the way there (a chic blouse nails Jordan’s young Tory energy) and framing individual verses as voice notes and private conversations helps to bring dimensionality to what would otherwise be quite

repetitive staging. Just like the cast of Friends before them, there are many high-powered jobs and conveniently a ordable living situations across the six pals – and poor Ben’s money worries are reduced to the butt of a joke. Despite the innuendo of its title, Sex with Friends is overly sanitised and would beneﬁt from lingering in more uncomfortable places. But writer and composer Sam Woof (who also plays Marc) is a promising talent, and this skilled cast, many of whom are performing in two shows a day, are impressively fresh. Sex with Friends is a clean, funny but platonic hour: justice for Ben!

Katie Hawthorne Photo: Callum John

50 festmag.com Music

51 Review

Kids Critics Sean Choolburra: Didj and Dance!

Astrid McCarthy, nine, dances at Didj and Dance!

Who was your favourite character and why?

Me! I got to dance in it.

Were there any characters you didn’t like? I liked everybody.

What did you like most about the show?

What didn’t you like about the show?

The person we were poking with the sticks didn’t like being poked with the sticks so he got up when he was supposed to be digging!

What did your grown-up think about the show?

He thought it was amazing because I won a prize!

Would you tell your friends to come to the show?

Yes! Yes yes yes! There was so much interactiveness in it and it was really good fun.

What happens in the show?

There’s this guy and he tells you about Australian origin stu . And he does lots of dancing and music and clapping.

When I poked that guy with the stick. We are all poking him with a stick. There were meant to be seven women with sticks but there were only six of us.

SHOW Sean Choolburra: Didj and Dance!

VENUE: Assembly Rooms

TIME: 11:30am – 12:30pm, 6–21 Aug

52 festmag.com Kids

Image: Courtesy of the artist

Kids Critics The Gruffalo,the Giant and the Mermaid with Julia Donaldson

Phoebe McCarthy, nine, is pleased to see Julia Donaldson

Were there any characters you didn’t like?

I didn’t like the Gru alo costume because it was creepy and you couldn’t event see its pupils. And I didn’t like how the eyes were coloured – it was the wrong shade of yellow, they were like a mango-ey orange.

What did you like most about the show?

What happens in the show?

It’s a bunch of the stories made by Julia Donaldson and she actually came!

Who was your favourite character and why?

I liked when one of the assistants had a tiny little body when they were being the tailor in The Smartest Giant In Town. That was funny.

SHOW The Gru alo, the Giant and the Mermaid with Julia Donaldson

VENUE: Underbelly, George Square

TIME: 11:00am – 12:00pm, 4–29 Aug, not 15

I liked The Highway Rat costume, it was very pretty.

What didn’t you like about the show?

The creepy Gru alo costume! And also that they only had the bad bits of The Highway Rat in it and for the other stories they did THE WHOLE BOOK.

What did your grown-up think about the show?

She very very very very very very very much liked it.

Would you tell your friends to come to the show?

Emmm. I would tell some of my younger friends, like someone who was ﬁve or six.

53 Reviews

Image: Courtesy of the artist

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VICTORIA TERRACE HIGH STREET LUTTONPLACE BUCCLEUCH STREET GEORGE SQUARE TEVIOTPLACE YORK PLACE LAURISTON PLACE COWGATE ASSMARKET MARKETSTREET HE MOUND HOLYROODROAD CANONGATE HIGH STREET ST MARY‘ S STREET BUCCLEUCH STREET CHAPELSTREET PLEA SANC E STLEONARDS STREET LLE DRIVE NICOLSONSTREET CLERKSTREET SOUTHCLERKSTREE SOUTH BR I DGE NORTH BR I DGE WATERLOOPLACE EA ST MARKET ST LE I T H ST R E ET COCKBURNSTREET CHAMBERSSTREET PRINCESSTREET BERNARDTERRACE JEFFREYSTREET 50 61 168 68 391 32 9 39 26 170 1 2 3 300 24 288 301 88 515 85 313 156 180 272 338 80 8 360 41 23 82 20 9 124 53 43 33 139 186 322 27 5 59 23 1 36 51 4 35 260 23 6 64 212 231 38 302 73 55 Map

00:00

International Comedy

Jam

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, 24–28 Aug

Bumble Me Tinders: Dating Horror Stories!

Laughing Horse @ The Pear Tree, 24–28 Aug

Just the Tonic’s Midnight Show

Just the Tonic at The Grassmarket Centre, 26–27 Aug

Late Show Great Show

Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 24–28 Aug

00:05

Sam Campbell: Comedy Show

Monkey Barrel Comedy, 24–28 Aug

Carter Morgan: American Idiot Paradise in The Vault, 24–28 Aug

00:10

Bob Hecklestein: The World’s Greatest Heckler

Just the Tonic at The Caves, 24–28 Aug

00:15

Hate N Live

Laughing Horse @ The Three Sisters, 24–28 Aug

The Heckling Hour

Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 24–28 Aug

00:30

Hummus: A er Dark

Laughing Horse @ The Three Sisters, 24–28 Aug

Comedy Striptease

Laughing Horse @ 32 Below, 24–28 Aug

00:35

The Fat Penguin Late Show

PBH’s Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth, 24–28 Aug

00:45

Ghost Orgy

Laughing Horse @ The Three Sisters, 24–29 Aug 00:50

The Late Late Irish Show

Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 24–28 Aug, not 15

01:00

Late Night Comedy Death Camp

Laughing Horse @ 32 Below, 24–28 Aug

Irish Jokers

Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, 24–28 Aug

01:15

Don’t Take That Tune With Me!

Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 24–28 Aug

07:00

Da odil Tramples the Fringe Fringe Online, 24–29 Aug

09:30

A Political Breakfast

PBH’s Free Fringe @ Natural Food Kafe, 24–28 Aug

09:45

About Comedy: Stand-Up

Comedy Courses

Laughing Horse @ Bar 50, 24 Aug

10:00

Stewart Lee: Basic Lee (Work in Progress)

The Stand Comedy Club, 24–28 Aug

Editburgh: The Factually Inaccurate Historical Walking Tour Meeting Point @ Ibis Hotel, 24–29 Aug

Irish Comedy Showcase

Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, 24–28 Aug